This invention is related generally to telephone systems and, in particular, to the billing of hotel and motel calls which are served by step-by-step exchanges.
It is a major objective of the telephone industry continually to improve existing telephone services and to introduce new services and features as technology allows. One such innovation was the introduction of automatic message accounting a number of years ago to provide telephone subscribers with itemized billing for long distance, or toll, telephone charges. Automatic message accounting (AMA) systems were incorporated into the local exchanges which had sufficient telephone traffic to justify economically the provision of the AMA equipment. More often, however, such local AMA systems were not economically justifiable. In these cases, AMA systems were usually provided at a tandem exchange through which toll traffic from many smaller exchanges was switched.
The great bulk of telephone traffic, consisting of locally completed calls, is not currently subject to billing by AMA systems. For such calls, some subscribers are periodically charged a flat rate without regard to the actual usage made of the telephone network by the subscriber. Thus, some subscribers, who make few local telephone calls, are charged the same basic flat rate as others who make large numbers of such calls. In other cases, subscribers are charged by means of a combination of flat rate and message rate billing. In these instances, a message register is associated with an individual subscriber, and message units are accumulated in the message register in accordance with the duration of local calls. The subscriber is billed according to the accumulated number of message units in excess of a predetermined number. In either event, the billing is on a bulk basis, and the subscriber has no convenient way of testing the accuracy of the billing, or of attributing portions of the bill to individual calls.
The foregoing situation is changing as a result of the recent introduction of the automatic message accounting and recording system (AMARS), which provides subscribers with itemized billing for local calls in accordance with the actual use made of the telephone network. This is termed usage-sensitive billing, which means that charging is computed according to the distance between calling and called subscriber on local calls and according to the duration of the calls. AMARS includes a remote processing center to which call information identifying calling and called subscribers and answer and disconnect times is routed from local exchanges not having AMA facilities. The processing center performs on-line translation functions of the calling and called numbers to determine a charging rate based on the actual distance of the call, and it provides call timing and makes AMA tape entries for subsequent billing in accordance with the charging rate and call duration.
AMARS fulfills its intended purpose satisfactorily. A problem remains, however, in the billing of local calls from hotels and motels. Hotel/motel guests must be charged by the hotel/motel for their telephone calls according to the amounts ultimately billed to the hotel/motel for those calls. For this purpose, it is still a common practice to locate at the hotel/motel premises a plurality of message registers, individually associated with guest rooms, which are used to measure guest telephone charges. Typically, a message register is pulsed over an M, or message, lead of a PBX trunk line by a trunk circuit associated with the connection in the local exchange serving the call. Although this measures charges based in part on the duration of calls, it does not take into account the distance between calling and called subscribers. In other words, it is not usage-sensitive.
In local exchanges of the common control type which are served by AMARS, it is relatively easy to provide usage-sensitive pulsing to hotel/motel message registers consistent with the billing information stored by AMARS. For example, in a crossbar local exchange, such as the No. 5 crossbar exchange manufactured by Western Electric Company, Inc. and disclosed in A. J. Busch, U.S. Pat. No. 2,585,904, translated routing information, which may be used to establish the usage-sensitive billing treatment to be applied, is obtained from markers for transmission to AMARS. Since the translated information is available at the local exchange, it becomes relatively easy to provide the appropriate message register pulsing from the local exchange to hotel/motel message registers consistently with the information stored by AMARS. U.S. Pat. No. 3,944,746, which issued to T. V. Burns et al on Mar. 16, 1976, discloses one arrangement for retrieving translated information from No. 5 crossbar markers, although message register pulsing is not therein disclosed.
Local step-by-step exchanges, operating in conjunction with AMARS, present an entirely different situation with regard to hotel/motel calls. There are no common control circuits and no available translated information at the exchange which may be used to determine the appropriate hotel/motel message register pulsing.